S4E6 - Ring Doorbell and the Neighborhood Surveillance State

If you’re out for an evening stroll, you can bet that someone’s watching, even if nobody’s home. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood surveillance state. Instead of Mr. Rogers, Jeff Bezos is putting on his cardigan and answering the door. Grab your shoes.

Ring Doorbells are popping up on porches across the country and around the world. What happens in your neighborhood no longer stays in your neighborhood. The video is getting uploaded to the cloud, everything from kidnappings to random acts of kindness.

Are Ring cameras making our neighborhoods safer or making us more suspicious? This is the 6 o’clock news at the neighborhood level. And police are finding new ways to patrol your streets without leaving the precinct.

Chris and Adam unpack the new normal for Christians who want to love their neighbor without violating their privacy.

Links

We recounted a bunch of stories in this episode. Read more about each one here: kidnapping, halloween, eavesdropping, trolling girl, aliens.

Caroline Haskins has covered Ring’s relationship with police in quite a number of articles for Vice. Quite.

Two earlier episodes from Device & Virtue, Season 2, touch on some of these same themes: Can I Get a Witness? (S2E1) and Fixing Our Privacy Settings (S2E2).

Photo by Qusai Akoud from StockSnap

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